Jack Carr discusses his military-inspired writing, like The Terminal List (optioned by Chris Pratt) and True Believer, blending raw SEAL experiences with unsanitized violence, while criticizing Hollywood’s interference—e.g., Dave Chappelle’s forced exit from The Chappelle Show. They dissect geopolitical missteps, from Reagan’s 1983 Beirut bombing decision to NATO’s role in Ukraine’s conflict, and question the military-industrial complex’s lack of accountability post-1947. Carr’s work reflects his lifelong fascination with insurgencies, historical mysteries like JFK’s assassination, and societal distractions, including UFOs and TikTok, while Rogan praises Carr’s authenticity and their shared frustration with identity politics and corporate branding. Ultimately, their conversation underscores the tension between creative freedom and systemic manipulation in modern America. [Automatically generated summary]
Oh, it feels great, but there's another one in the works, so it doesn't really stop.
I mean, I hear some guys like John Grisham talk about they do six months of work and six months off, and that's kind of the routine that they've gotten on.
But for me, it's go, go, go, this, the next one, scripts, although...
I'm not changing the dynamic of any room, I don't think, but people definitely in the airport stop and say hi, and I feel so just fortunate that people are interested enough in the books or the podcast or the TV show or whatever to actually recognize me and say hi.
One guy recognized me by my Sitka backpack last night.
I was flying out here, and he's like, the backpack gave you away, because I was in the corner calling my wife on Mother's Day and my mom on Mother's Day.
I don't spend too much time worrying about it, but like our kids' parents, his friends' parents, you know, that sort of thing.
Like, did you read his book?
It was a little disturbing.
Maybe our kids shouldn't play over there, type of a thing.
Oh, really?
Well, I don't know, but that's kind of what I think about.
Like, if I was someone else's parent and was to read this and not know me, never having met me, and all of a sudden you read this thing, like, oh, maybe our son or daughter should find another friend.
I didn't know how it was going to work with Hollywood because it was my first time down that road.
And I didn't think they were going to say, hey, you know what?
You have this, and I know it's important, and I know who the guys are, but how about this company?
They're paying us, so let's put that in there instead.
And it wasn't like that at all, which was pretty cool.
And I think it's all because Chris Antoine Fuqua and the showrunner just held the line and said, hey, no, we're just going to use these things and make it organic and authentic and root this whole thing in this foundation of operator culture.
Since we're on alcohol and we're on all that stuff, let me do this before I don't forget because this is pretty amazing here.
I know you like cigars and as do I. This right here, so these cigars right here, Hooten Young, the guys that we just talked to about this whiskey, that Jack Carr edition right there.
So what they did, they called me and I was kind of like, a million things going on and I pick up and they started to talk to me about this and it gave me goosebumps.
The guys that put this together aren't just Hooten Young, aren't just Norm Hooten.
I'm going to call them two Army Rangers and a Special Forces guy.
But we can talk more about them.
Just incredible human beings who have sacrificed so much for this nation.
And so they did this, and then he kept talking to me, and he said, under these cigars, under each one right here, so if I pull one of these out, You can see that there is some dirt under each one of these right here.
And it's laminated in there over the top.
So there's dirt and there's a little laminate over it.
And each one of these comes from a special place.
And right here, D-Day Invasion, Sacred Sand Recovered from Omaha Beach in Normandy.
Iranian hostage crisis, April 24, 1980, Operation Eagle Claw.
So that's when they went in to try to rescue the American hostages in Iran, Tehran, and they landed at a place called Desert One.
One of the refueling birds hit one of the, or one of the refueling C-130s hit one of the helicopters and there was an explosion and people died and they had to abort the mission.
They didn't have enough helicopters to keep going so they brought dirt back from that.
There is not much dirt That they brought back, but there's some in here.
And Battle of Mogadishu, October 3rd to 4th, 1993, Operation Gothic Serpent.
Sand smuggled from the Black Hawk Down crash site in Mogadishu, Somalia.
Holy shit.
Under there.
World Trade Center attack, Operation Enduring Freedom.
The steel right here.
And Saddam Hussein, Operation Iraqi Freedom from March 20th, 2003. So...
There is dirt from some amazing dates in special operations and military history in here.
And each one of these cigars, you can tell right here, has...
And so this stuff, I think it's launching tomorrow or today when this thing launches.
So that'll be out there.
And what's crazy is you have to go through these patent things, like trademark stuff, you know, with attorneys and things, and there's different little categories.
So you have to do subcategories if you want to patent the cross tomahawks.
So I have lawyers doing all that, and part of that's whiskey.
And so they did the whiskey one.
And like right away, the Jack Daniels lawyers, boom, right on it.
Like they are very aggressive when it comes to any whiskey that has Jack in it, even though it's obviously a different label, a different style of bottle, different, you know, no connection.
Yeah, yeah, so there's Car Wine, Car Vineyards, maybe, in Northern California, I think, and, you know, they're out there in all the grocery stores, and they're pretty big.
So that was coming to a head anyway, and they probably should have negotiated, or not, they should have.
It's been a long time in the works, just because things have changed so much since the last writer's strike when it comes to streaming.
But then right when that comes to a head, AI hits the news this January.
AI with ChatGPT and all that stuff, and people are putting in, as you've seen, people can just say, hey, write a show about X, Y, or Z, and pops out.
Not bad.
Do a little editing.
Off it goes.
And you don't have to pay a writer's room.
So if you're an executive and you're beholden to, I guess, shareholders or whatever it is, Maybe that's attractive, but not so attractive to those people who make their living coming up with these ideas in a writer's room and then making all this money.
Essentially, the foundation of everything that we see in film and television happens in those writer's rooms and happens from these creators.
It's not huge money they're making anyway, but it's just how do you deal with streaming and how do we deal with AI, and we'll see.
Because we're dealing with ChatGPT4 now, and as ChatGPT5, 6, and 7 roll out, I would imagine they're going to be able to write in the style of Jack Carr and write a perfect James Reese novel.
Because you don't want to have the same novel every time.
Just you pick somebody up and he's a carbon cutout and you drop him now in Europe.
Now he's getting revenge.
Now he's in Africa getting revenge.
Now he's in China.
So I wanted to avoid that.
And that was right out of the gate.
I was cognizant of that being something that could be an issue if you have a success.
Just kind of trying to copy that.
And I never wanted to do that.
I always wanted to evolve, just like anything else in life.
Like in the SEAL teams, My whole mission was to be a better operator and a better leader today than I was yesterday.
Personal front, be a better husband and father than I was yesterday.
And for writing, be a better author for the next book than I was for this one.
I want my next sentence to be better than the sentence before.
So this one, James Reese is on a journey.
And that's one of the one things that we have in common.
Just with everyone else on this planet, we're all on a journey.
No matter your race, your religion, your socioeconomic background, you're on a journey, and you don't know how much time you have on this planet.
You get one ride, and so I've got to make it count.
So people are trusting me with that time, which is something I take extremely seriously.
So as much thought goes into any Instagram post or blog or question for a guest on my podcast or whatever it is, as goes into any sentence in the novel, And I want to always improve on that craft every single time.
So James Reese is on this journey.
He's not the same guy he was in the first book.
Not the same guy he was in the third.
And he's not the same guy he is in the sixth one.
He's evolving.
He's learning.
Taking those past successes and failures and taking those lessons and applying them forward.
Hopefully his wisdom.
Hopefully we're all doing that.
Except for Bud Light and Miller Light, apparently.
But it's this narrow view of what a woman is supposed to be, that a woman is only supposed to be a lady who's succeeding and killing it in the corporate world.
Yeah, we did like 22 dates and I got to become friends with Charlie and Heffron and we traveled around and that was when Bud Light embraced this humorous, like sort of dopey man version of, you know, beer, which is like what everybody likes.
So we have this podcast that we do called Protect Our Parks that I do with Shane Gillis and Ari Shafir and Mark Normand, and we get hammered most of the time.
And we're trying to figure out what's the least woke beer to drink.
And Mark Norman said, Colt 45. And I think he's right.
Old English 800 is just slightly, well, it raises, it ranges from 5.9 to 8. Maybe we need, well, I would say Canada is the wokest fucking place on earth right now.
I would have said go with Canadian beer because Canadian beer is like 9%.
Just because they have an idea of what you should and shouldn't eat.
And if someone confronted them, like, unless you are growing your own vegetables and you know exactly what happens, you are responsible for animal death 100%.
I mean, there's a crazy video of this...
This combine going through a field, and it goes to this patch of, I guess it's probably corn or something like that, and 13 deer run out of there.
And it's just like the stock market, the ups and downs in the markets for those things.
Did you see that recent, I think it was in Kenya, I just saw it maybe yesterday or the day before, but the villagers out there killed a lion, an old lion, and it made the news, but not so much in the way that some of the others have, because this lion was eating some of their livestock.
And they're like, oh, guess what?
This is killing our livestock.
That's how we survive, so we're going to kill it.
So they did.
And, of course, you know, and ask more questions about, well, why and why is there not hunting here?
And if there was hunting, would that animal have had value?
And then would there be incentive to keep those populations at a certain level and apply the science to it and make sure...
But there's none of that.
They just kill it.
And that's how it goes because these things are killing your livestock that you feed your family with.
But that's the problem about not putting the requisite time, energy, and effort into studying an issue, no matter what that issue is, and just making a snap decision based on something that someone with a lot of followers puts out there.
All of a sudden, that is your...
That's your position as well, rather than, hmm, let me just do some study here.
Let me think about this a little more, and now I'll make my decision.
And also, there's the thing about wildlife conservation that's very uncomfortable.
And what's uncomfortable is that it really bothers us that the only way animals really have value in terms of these wild populations of antelope and...
Gazelles and all these different things they hunt in Africa, the way they've made them thrive is by putting value on them to hunt them.
Especially in America, with the Pittman-Robertson Act, where a percentage of all ammunition sales, of all gear, all hunting gear, and it turns into all that goes towards wildlife conservation.
It's one of the—wildlife conservation in this country and the preservation of public land for recreational use and hunting and fishing and camping is one of the greatest things this country has ever pioneered.
It's pretty cool to see them fly for the first time when you think that maybe they don't, and then you see them go up to roost or come down, and that's pretty cool.
It says wild turkeys can fly at speeds of up to 40 miles an hour, 50 miles an hour, but only for short distances, usually limit their flight distance to about 100 yards or less.
Because there's books to write and scripts to write.
Well, not right now, but you reprioritize and focus on book seven.
And then I have this nonfiction coming out, which is taking a lot more time.
research than I anticipated which the first one is on the 1983 Beirut Barracks bombing so it's when it's my first foray into the nonfiction side of the house so working on that right now with an amazing guy a historian Pulitzer Prize finalist James Scott and there's really not the seminal work on that event yet but as a kid I remember just how impactful that was to me seeing the news Newsweek and time and come across our dining room table and seeing those photos and knowing that I was going to go in the military even at that young age and
So I was always interested in insurgencies and counterinsurgencies and terrorism and special operations.
Yeah, so October of 1983, there was two actual car bombs, one with the French paratroopers and one with the Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon.
And there were some lead-up events.
The first large one that really people noticed, the bombing of the American Embassy in Beirut in April 1983. And then there's some newly declassified documents from the Reagan administration that talk about what was going on behind the scenes and who was advocating to put Marines ashore, who wanted to keep them on amphib ships.
So a little smaller than an aircraft carrier, but...
Take Marines around who wanted to keep them on those ships in a little safer area out on the water in the Med.
And then who made the decision?
Well, the president made the final decision.
And I talked to Michael Reagan about it.
He said that decision haunted his father until the day he died.
And so they put Marines ashore in Beirut, Lebanon.
And then there was a bomb that took out those barracks.
And it was the largest marine loss of life since Iwo Jima in World War II. And so I'm doing this research right now.
So now when we work on these scripts for the second season of The Terminalist, well, we have to figure that out.
It's going to change, obviously, because they actually invaded instead of, like in the book, the hero, of course, wins the day.
But when he talks about that and talks about population decline, very steep population decline in Russia and gives the reasons behind it, and talks about the ethnic Russian population in Ukraine being the largest outside of Russia, and he looked at how long you can field an army before you can't field that army anymore.
And 2022 was that year.
So in order to field the army at current levels, they had to invade by that time.
And we really...
I mean, this is going back to learning lessons from the past and applying them going forward as wisdom, because we really made that invasion inevitable by some of our decisions at the end of the Cold War in the early 90s, all the way through the 90s, and really set things up to make that invasion an inevitability. and really set things up to make that invasion an NATO expansion.
NATO expansion, promises.
So I like to look at things through the enemy's eyes, which I did in The Devil's Hand, my fourth book.
But I think it's important to look at things through the enemy's eyes because it allows you to then make decisions taking that into account.
And so with Russia certainly knowing what our response would be to an invasion of Ukraine, that's what I incorporated into this one.
So if you knew what we would do if they invaded Ukraine, what should you do now as Russia to set yourself up to...
Success is the wrong word, but financially.
So with gas and oil sales and contracts and futures with India and with China.
People should read those before they just retweet something.
But he is, I mean, he is detailed in those accounts of where people are, what military exercises are going on that would cover, cover for action we call it, to allow the U.S. to go in and blow up those pipelines.
So it's very, and now it's, I think, fairly established that what he writes in there is actually true.
There was an assistant secretary of state, I think she was, saying similar things out there.
So when we go back and look at these things and don't apply any political bias to it and just apply common sense, that's the other thing we don't do.
And it's Carl Klausiewicz, who wrote On War, said the most important attribute of a battlefield leader is common sense.
George Marshall, World War II, said the same thing.
And we neglect to apply common sense to a lot of these things, whether it's as a populace or our elected officials or military leaders.
So there's a lack of common sense and a stark lack of accountability as well.
So it's very therapeutic for me to write some of these novels because I get to hold people accountable in a fictional sense that you couldn't do in real life.
Is it a lack of common sense or is it a willingness to ignore consequences because of the financial interest or the political interest in what you're trying to accomplish?
That's a huge part of it and we can see a change in 1947. So when the defense establishment and the intelligence agencies were all reorganized in 1947, when we changed the Department of War to the Department of Defense, it became an industry.
And it stopped being a profession of arms and started becoming a career of arms for senior level officers in particular.
And at the same time, we start seeing a lack of accountability because up to that point, we go back to the Civil War and see Lincoln go through general after general until he got to Grant.
And same thing in World War II. George Marshall went through general after general after general, admiral after admiral after admiral until he got to those names that we all know today who led us to victory in World War II. And then for some reason, and that means that there were people in those positions before who didn't measure up.
So George Marshall would give them a chance and maybe a second one, but not a third.
And then they'd put somebody in place regardless of rank, essentially.
He'd promote people into the rank they needed to be for those positions if they showed promise.
And that's how we got to these leaders that we all know the last names.
And we lost that after World War II, particularly in Vietnam.
Now we start seeing people not held accountable for mistakes.
We certainly see it with Afghanistan.
20 years they had to prepare for this eventuality.
20 years.
And then the best they can do is what we saw in August of 2021. And someone who has no touch points with the military, never read a book on military history, strategy, tactics, doesn't know anyone in the military, maybe even never seen a military film, can apply common sense to that situation and say, look, Wait, it looks like Bagram here would be the tactically advantageous position, which it was.
Why are we putting our junior level enlisted people at this gate, at this essentially a public airport in Kabul, putting them in a tactically disadvantageous position to get out of there after we had 20 years to prepare to leave?
And once again, no one held accountable.
And there's a great book.
It's called The Afghanistan Papers by Craig Whitlock.
And after two Freedom of Information Act lawsuits by the Washington Post, they got access to these classified histories of the war.
And so they took these generals and admirals coming back, and they interviewed them, and they thought these interviews were going to stay classified.
And so what Craig Whitlock does once he got access to this is he juxtaposes what they said in private that they thought was going to stay classified to what they said in front of Congress.
And they are 180 out from each other.
And once again, no one held accountable.
All those guys make rank.
They fail up.
And then sit on boards of defense industry companies going forward.
But how frustrating is it for you and how infuriating is it as a man who's a veteran, who served, who's been deployed overseas, who's been in these conflicts to see this happening?
And to see no accountability and to see these poor choices being made over and over again that put veterans' lives at risk, put our lives at risk, and put the entire world in this state right now where we're genuinely concerned.
Yeah, no, it's tough because you lose friends over there.
People lose arms, legs, wheelchairs.
They sacrifice so much.
And they're trusting those senior level leaders to make good decisions, politicians and military leaders.
And then they see what happens over there.
And so it's very natural to ask that question.
Was it all worth it?
What were we doing over there for all these years, for 20 years?
So it's very natural to ask that question.
Yeah.
You know, for my own sanity, I just go back to taking those lessons learned and applying them going forward in a way that honors the sacrifice of those who did lose their lives, who didn't come home or who came home changed forever because of post-traumatic stress or traumatic brain injury, missing arms and legs.
And my hope, I hate to say hope, is that we can take those lessons and apply them to the next generation so they don't have to learn those same lessons in blood.
But I guess I'm not hopeful because we have shown time and time again that we have a very difficult time doing that for some reason.
And I don't know why that is, but it's extremely disheartening.
It also sets up that next generation for failure because you have these people coming up the ranks and they see these generals sit in front of Congress, say certain things.
You can go back to every single testimony from these guys and they all say pretty much the same thing.
And you can go back and look at these, and Craig Wilhuck spells it all out.
He has the transcripts in there.
And there's one, and I forget who it is right now, an exact time, but it's around the 2009-2010 time frame.
Where there's one senior level official who's in charge of Afghanistan.
He doesn't even say anything bad.
He's just kind of like, you know, it's not going as great as we may have led you to believe.
And then a few months later, he has quietly moved aside and somebody else is put in.
So that tells everybody else coming up behind them that if they want to get this next star and they want to sit on the board of company X, Y, or Z, they better tow this line.
It's an ecosystem that includes politicians, it includes military leaders, both in uniform and just out sitting on these boards, lobbyists, permanent Washington.
It's all a part of this huge infrastructure that is moving forward.
And just like any company, you've got to show profits.
And we all thought when you could carry the internet around in your pocket with that first iPhone, I mean, you thought, oh, when we have a discussion and someone says, no, it's this, you know, it's this, guess what?
We don't have to argue about it.
We can look it up right here.
And it's going to be great because we can solve all these arguments immediately.
And what did it do?
Well, it just snowballed into this thing where it divides us even further rather than someone saying, oh, look, oh, I was wrong.
Oh, yeah, it says it right here.
No, it just divides us even further.
And, of course, Adventist social media, it's a tool.
And any tool can be used for productive purposes or as a weapon.
And we have weaponized social media for sure to divide.
Who benefits?
Well, politicians that need to galvanize bases, of course, and the social media companies themselves who have lobbyists in Washington who pay a lot of money to these politicians.
And it's a whole ecosystem.
And so being aware of it, I think, is the first step.
So for our kids, I talk about it with them.
And I always ask the question, how am I being manipulated?
Which is kind of a cynical way to look at things, but you kind of have to today.
And then with the advent of AI, that's a whole other side of it.
Like figuring out what is truth and what is not and what's been made up and what podcast is real and what's not.
It's a crazy situation.
But I want the kids to know that even if they're following somebody on social media, like a person, that's an advertisement for that person and their life.
And you can see time and time again, beautiful families out there and they're showing here we are in Aruba or whatever.
And here we are with our Easter photo together.
And then the next week there's their divorce, and there's abuse, and it's like, this whole thing was all a farce.
Isn't that crazy?
Yeah, so that's an advertising, just like a company.
It's kind of like when you have a psychologist or a psychiatrist on, and they're Really getting into your life, maybe, or they're out there giving advice, giving all this advice, and then you find out that in the background there, they're a total disaster, and they're a crazy person.
That happens more often than I'm not sorry to psychologists and psychologists out there, but you know it's true.
And the catastrophic disasters that we're talking about are nuclear.
And if there's a nuclear disaster, you know, it's that Einstein quote, I don't know what weapons World War III will be fought with, but World War IV will be fought with rocks and sticks.
And that's what scares the shit out of me is that, you know, you got a guy like Putin who may or may not have cancer, you know, who's backed into a corner.
What does he do if he thinks he's going to lose and he thinks he's going to die?
So the only thing I think about in that point is who benefits if you use even tactical nuclear weapons in a place like Ukraine?
That's the area that they want.
So when you look at it logically, maybe they can move some things around on a board and move nuclear weapons closer or farther away or that sort of a thing as kind of pieces on a chessboard.
But if you want to invade a country because you want its population and because you want its food sources, then to nuke it doesn't really play in.
I'm sure there are people that are drawn to it for fewer reasons and want to serve and they started businesses and made money and want to give back and they're concerned about the future of the country.
I'm sure they exist, but man, people get into those positions and they sure do pick stocks a lot better than they did before.
And in my first book, I talk about, hey, you show me a politician in Washington and I'm going to show you a family member who has some sort of a lobbying firm or this or that.
And then what are we seeing with the Biden administration?
You're seeing some of that right now on the front pages.
The fact that he's just completely unqualified to be in those positions that he's at making the kind of money that he was making and Doing it for Russia and China.
It's just it's so and Ukraine.
Yeah You know, I mean what's crazy is that Ukraine was thought to be one of the most corrupt countries Up until Russia invaded them and now they're the darling you get Sean Penn's given his Oscar to Zelensky and it's like We are so fucking lost That's what goes back to doing the research.
And then you have, let's say, going back to Hunter Biden laptop, you have 50, what, 51, 52 intelligence officials who signed some letter that's now shown that they were coerced into signing, not coerced into signing this thing, but they signed it for a reason to give their candidate, the establishment candidate, a talking point in a debate.
That undercuts everyone's confidence in those institutions anyway.
And it was always a little shaky, your confidence in an intelligence service, just in general.
I mean, when I have conversations with my kids about politics and life and stuff, it's like, you know, my young kids, not my oldest is 26. When I'm talking to my 12, well, now 13 and 14-year-olds and 15-year-olds, when I'm talking to them, they're at this point where they're going to be graduating from high school in a few years.
They're going to be going to college.
They're going to be entering into the workforce and doing stuff.
What do you tell them about this insanely corrupt system that's supposed to be the controlling operating system of this greatest country the world has ever known, this experiment in self-government?
And so what we do is we go back and talk about all those sacrifices that were made so we can have these options and opportunities in the hopes that our kids take a pause and actually become part of the solution and respect What has happened in the past so that we can be this country we are today, even though we seem to be pretty good at destroying ourselves from the inside out right now.
We did have a civil war, and at the end of that civil war, we did manage to come back together.
We didn't have this tool that you could use to continue to divide.
So I often wonder, after the Civil War, if we had iPhones in our pockets and two sides or even some other factions that wanted to continue to divide and either prolong or whatever it was.
I think social media is a problem, but at least social media has this, at least with Elon on board.
Elon being in control of Twitter has this self-correcting option that's built in with community notes where say if you are a politician and you tweet something and a bunch of people say that is not correct at all.
Twitter will put a community note on and show all the real facts.
And the Biden administration has deleted tweets because they've been checked.
So if you want to maintain hope for the nation, don't go into the comments section of Instagram, Twitter, or YouTube, because very quickly you will come to the conclusion that all is lost.
I don't read anything about myself, and it's given me great sanity over the last few years.
It's a giant factor, and I try to drill it into all these comedians' heads.
Like, please, don't read the comments.
Just don't do it.
First of all, especially if they do a podcast, if you're doing this, like I had my friends Sarah Weinshank and Kim Congdon on, and after the podcast was over, I was like, please don't read the comments.
Just please.
We had a great time.
It was a lot of fun.
I enjoyed it.
I think it was really funny.
Don't read the comments.
They did?
Of course they did.
Dang it.
They're used to...
Small podcast that might get a thousand downloads or a couple thousand downloads.
Now you got 11 million people that are commenting on every fucking thing you've said, and the only thing you're gonna think of is the negatives.
And these girls suck, and they're fucking losers, and they're not funny, they're this or that.
Those are just unhappy, bitter people.
Was it Michael Jordan who said it?
I don't remember who said it.
I've never met a hater doing better than me.
I don't remember who said it.
But it's the perfect quote.
You've got people that are allowed to have their opinions.
I don't not read it because it's not like I'm immune.
I read it because it's natural human nature to look for threats.
And if you read a hundred quotes that are great and then one that sucks and that one person says this person should kill themselves and they're a this and a that and a that and a this and like, oh my God, am I that person?
Sam Harris told me once that he was on a trip in Hawaii with his family and he read something negative about him and it tanked his whole trip because he spent his entire time crafting a response.
And no matter if you're a special operator, people think you have this thick skin and you're tough.
You went to Iraq and Afghanistan and made through buds or all that stuff.
For me, anyway, it definitely hurts.
But I try to get on there still and say thank you to people because I can still do it at the end of the night.
That's beautiful.
But I want to say thank you, but it also means I see the craziness.
And so I see that.
I never respond to it, but I want to say thank you to all those people who, grassroots, like before you were kind enough to invite me on here, before Chris Pratt texted about the show or posted about the show, before I was on Tucker, it was all grassroots.
It was all somebody taking a risk on me as a new author, telling a friend, and so when people get on and say, hey, I love your book, I gave it to my dad, now he's a fan, I want to say thank you to that person.
So I'm up late doing that, but it also means that I see...
Yeah, there comes a point in time where you just have to post things and then say thank you in the post, but you can't respond to people individually just because it's just bad for your brain.
So I haven't done it in a while, but I used to read, go into the negative reviews on Amazon and then read those and kind of have a little fun with them.
And when I went on Tucker, I read the negative reviews from the show and that was fun because the Daily Beast was, oh, they were just mean.
There were some mean ones out there.
Like the audience on Rotten Tomatoes was...
Crazy high for a show.
I mean, it was in the high 90s.
But then the critics weren't big fans.
But every single day we realized and we're making that show that we're not making it for critics.
We're making it for that person who went downrange to Iraq and Afghanistan over the last 20 years when they sit down.
Crack a beer and sit on the couch and turn this thing on that they at least know we put in the effort to make a show For them that pay tribute to them that was rooted in the realities of modern combat And we put in the work you fucking nailed it no doubt and you nailed it on the show though They made that show so fucking gritty and whenever someone makes an adaptation of a very brutal novel or multiple novels like yours You always wonder, like, God, are they going to be able to really do it?
Yeah, that's a tribute to Chris Pratt and Antoine Fuqua, who were from the get-go.
They wanted this thing.
They wanted to make it for the people who went downrange.
And every single day we talked about that, knowing that there's going to be Hollywood hot sauce in anything.
You've got to do that.
But anywhere we could, anywhere we could root this in the realities of modern combat, we were going to do that.
And if we had to reshoot something or change something in the script on the fly, we were going to do that.
And that's Chris and Antoine and the showrunner, David Agilio and Max Adams, former Army Ranger, who's in that writer's room every day, and Jared Shaw, my buddy who was there every day, who gave the book to Chris Pratt, and Ray Mendoza, another SEAL buddy out there doing the technical advising.
I mean, they were all in.
And you had Chris and Antoine and David DiGilio trusting those guys on set every day.
So if one of them said, this is not going to play to that person who went to Iraq and Afghanistan, we'd change it right there.
Yeah, and it was fun to read it and have a good time with it on Tucker.
I got so many people reaching out to me saying they love that, and we just had a little fun on a Friday reading those things and, you know, just reading their own words back to them and having a little fun with it.
So that's kind of a healthy way to deal with it rather than looking at it and just trying to craft that response or, like, getting mad about it.
Like, they're going to hate it anyway, and that's okay.
That's not their thing.
There's plenty of other things out there that they can love, and that's okay.
We're going to make something for us here.
And then that's what we're doing.
We're taking that guiding principle because I don't think Amazon will ever – none of those streaming companies will ever share their data, but they know exactly how many people watched every single show, when they changed the channel, when they got to an end of episode and didn't go to the next one.
They have all that data.
And that's the reason that we're doing a spinoff and a second season.
So spin-off is, there's a character, Ben Edwards, and so spoiler alert for those who have not seen it, we'll just give you two seconds to put the earmuffs on.
So he's killed at the end, and so it's a prequel that goes back to show how he went from the SEAL teams to the CIA, essentially how he turns bad.
It's played by Taylor Kitsch, who is just awesome.
And that's one of the characters I thought was more fully developed than the character in my novel.
And on the page and then what Taylor Kitsch brought to it was just next level.
So when we did the premiere in LA in June and it debuted on July 1st, but we did the premiere in June, I came home and for some reason I had a day without interruption.
I don't know where my wife and kids were, but I was sitting in a chair that I would never sit in if I didn't want to be interrupted.
And I wrote from the second I woke up all the way through the night until they got back.
And I wrote a spinoff.
And I sent it to the showrunner, David DiGilio, and he loved it.
And then a couple days later, Chris Pratt called.
And he's like, hey, I have this idea for a spinoff.
And he pitched me on it.
And it wasn't mine.
It was not my spinoff.
Mine was totally different.
And his was this Taylor Kitsch spinoff, a prequel, going back in time a little bit.
And I said, Chris, that's amazing.
Let's do that.
That's a great idea.
And so he pitched it to Taylor.
Taylor was all on board and then we put a package together and pitched it to Amazon and they loved it and so off we go to the races with this spin-off which is more of an international espionage type of a show rather than revenge thriller Action thriller, conspiracy thriller like the first one.
And it is awesome.
And also nobody can compare it to a book.
So even fans of the book that look at it and say, this is different, this is different, this is different.
I hate it because there's no prequel.
And then that leads right into the second season, True Believer starring Chris Pratt.
So we'll roll right into that.
And things in Hollywood, as you know, can go off the rails at any time.
I always have, you know, that's just how it goes.
But right now, we're working on those scripts, or well, we put the pencils down about five days ago now, six days ago, seven days ago for the writer's strike, but we were about at episode five, and it's good.
We're supposed to do it sometime in the fall, or early fall, and start filming then, and then post-production, and who knows when they get it out after that.
Yeah, it's very edited, and it's also like there's an audience there, so you're playing to the audience.
You're well aware, and there's stuff that's filmed, stuff that's not filmed.
Chris is the same thing, man.
Chris is so...
Me and my wife were having a conversation about actors.
You know, and she was talking about someone that was very annoying, and I said, yeah, I go, it's rare, but it makes you cherish the ones that are cool, like Scott Eastwood.
Scott Eastwood, if you didn't know that he was Clint Eastwood's son, if you didn't know he's a big movie star, he's like the fucking nicest, most normal, no-ego-having guy, just friendly and normal.
But yeah, Chris saw it early because Jared Shaw, my buddy, gave him a copy because of a favor I did for Jared and the SEAL teams, which I just did because, once again, you want to help good guys.
And he was getting out of the SEAL team, so I introduced him to some people in the private sector and followed up, and I forgot all about it.
And he Never did.
So he called me when he heard that I had a book coming out.
So a few months before it came out in November of 2017, he called me and said, Hey man, I always wanted to thank you for what you did for me.
And I couldn't remember what it was.
And he told me what it was.
And I said, Oh man, great.
How's it going?
It's going great, but I heard you have a book coming out.
And I said, yeah, I can send you an early copy if you'd like.
And he said, well, I'd like to give it to a friend of mine if that's okay.
And I said, yeah, no problem.
Who's that?
And Chris Pratt.
And that's who I thought about playing the role when I was writing it before he'd been in Guardians, before he'd been in Jurassic World.
But I saw him make the transformation to SEAL Operator in Zero Dark Thirty, where he had a very small role.
So I thought, okay, I see this guy right here.
Look at that transformation.
And he seems like an inherently likable person on and off screen.
And then I thought back then, I'm going to give Chris a chance here.
I'm going to help his career along because it looks like he needs...
This is me writing my first sentence of the book in Coronado, California, still in the SEAL teams in a little office off our bedroom.
But I thought of Chris Pratt.
And that's because back in the day, everybody loved Magnum P.I. in the 80s.
Because he was funny, but he could flip that switch and he could get it done.
In one episode, we talked about this once before, there's an episode where it's the first time on network television where a protagonist kills a bad guy who's unarmed.
And it's an amazing episode.
They had to fight for it and they got it.
And now it's a classic episode of 80s television.
And so I thought about that, flipping that switch.
I thought about my background in the SEAL teams and coming home to wife and kids and all that stuff and having to flip that switch.
And I thought, Chris is the guy who can pull this off.
He hasn't done something like this, hasn't been in action films yet.
And so I thought of Chris and I thought of Antoine being the director.
And because I love what he did with Training Day and Tears of the Sun and a movie called Shooter based on Point of Impact by Stephen Hunter.
And I just loved Antoine's work, so I thought, this is the guy.
And now we're all three executive producers on it and doing it.
Well, it certainly didn't take up any of that bandwidth, worried about it not happening.
And I think a lot of that comes from just knowing what I wanted to do from a very early age, serve my country specifically as a SEAL, and then write thrillers back from my earliest days.
So I started building this foundation at age 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, reading all these guys like Tom Clancy and Nelson DeMille and A.J. Quinnell and J.C. Pollock and Mark Olden and Louis L'Amour and Stephen Hunter.
All these guys back in the 80s who had protagonists with backgrounds I wanted in real life one day.
So I read all those and I just loved the magic in those pages and knew that one day I'd write those.
But that wasn't like Machiavellian.
I wasn't like, I'm going to read these today at age 12 so that one day I can write them at age 45. No, I just loved those books.
And then I was studying warfare and insurgencies and counterinsurgencies and terrorism and special operations.
So I had this academic study of warfare that's never stopped.
And then I had the practical application on the field of battle in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It all came together.
I never worried about not making it.
I only saw a number one New York Times bestseller on all those books I read growing up.
I only saw those books like First Blood made into a film.
And so that was what was always in my mind.
So if I write this book, it's going to be a number one New York Times bestseller and it's going to be optioned by whoever I want to make it a number one film.
And that stuff happened.
But I didn't worry about it not happening, if that makes sense.
Maybe it's a little naivete, which seems to have been fun.
Yeah, it's that bandwidth, because you're thinking about those other things.
Where for me, all my heart and soul went into the book, continued to go into the books, every single sentence.
And for me, writing these kind of books, I don't have to go out there and find a sniper from Ramadi in 2006. I don't have to go find somebody who was in an ambush.
Right.
in Los Angeles, California.
So I go back and think of the feelings and emotions associated with that event that I was in, and then I apply those completely to a fictional narrative without any filters.
So I don't have to interview somebody and then have those answers get filtered through other interviews that I've done or other movies I've seen or research that I've done and then go into the page of the book.
It goes right from my heart and soul right into that page, so.
So I think that helped as well and made it stand out to Simon& Schuster and makes it resonate with readers and resonate to Chris and Antoine because they both loved it and wanted to be a part of it and now they're leading the charge on it and they wanted me involved from the get-go all the way through from writing it to being a part of the writers room and as an advisor and then learning that, how that went down, doing the casting, seeing everybody that came through wanting to be in it.
And then through production and post-production and then marketing and advertising and then the premiere and then negotiations for a second season and a spin-off and being a part of all that from the inside was...
I absolutely love every part of the process writing this.
So I'm going to write James Reese for as long as I possibly can.
I do that and have the nonfiction that I'm so passionate about with history.
So that'll be coming out here in a year and a half.
And then there's another thing in the works that got put on a little bit of hold because of the writer's strike.
But I'll text you about it when it comes through.
But there's some other things in the works that I thought would be done by now.
But yeah, writer's strike, everything goes on hold for that.
But there's some other things that will allow me to write some other characters and work on some other productions I guess is the best way to put it so it's a pretty cool actions or the novels or yeah So there's some other exactly both both.
But the casting was really interesting because you see these people who you've grown up watching who during the time, it's kind of COVID, well, it is COVID time, so they're doing screen tests.
And you're seeing these people that everyone knows the name of, like doing a screen test, wanting to be in the show.
And I'm like part of that.
It's crazy.
It was crazy.
And then Taylor, of course, just knocked it out of the park when we saw the screen test with him and Chris.
Like, there was no question, like, Taylor is Ben Edwards, and Taylor is just an awesome dude, and he's so fired up to get to where we're just texting on the way over here.
And he's so excited to get to work on this next one.
And yeah, he just elevated that character to a new level.
And it comes down to them setting the tone, like Antoine at that strategic level, so up there as the director, executive producer right there at the top, setting that tone strategically, and then Chris right there also as the tactical level inspiration for everybody on set.
So everybody wanted to be there, and they're at the top of their games.
And so many people came up to me on set, and they didn't have to, and they said they'd been on hundreds of sets in Hollywood, and they've never felt like this on a set before.
It was just something about it.
It was inspiring.
They wanted to be there, do their best work, and crush it, because it was fun.
But audiobooks are the fastest-growing segment of publishing, and I'm so fortunate to have Ray Porter, who's also an awesome guy, by the Shakespearean-trained actor.
He's been in tons of shows.
If you look up Ray Porter, you can see just a list of shows that he's been in.
I think about, well, maybe I should say that this person has some crazy accent in the first sentence so that Ray doesn't read and get halfway down the page and have to go back and then start with it again.
So I do think about Ray as I'm writing and trying to make things that make sense for him.
We're all products of our experience and what we decide to study.
So there are maybe some characters in these books that might seem similar to some people at higher levels of government or military.
And I kind of morph some things together and maybe make them worse or sometimes better than they actually are.
So yeah, we're a product of our environments and the education we choose to give ourselves these days and what we pay attention to and our life experience.
So all that ends up in these pages.
No one's come up yet, though, and been upset about it.
Well, we all saw it with Afghanistan, so there is that.
You see the process of people sitting on these boards after their time in uniform and then approving gigantic contracts for these companies in positions that they were just in prior where they had that chance to approve, and now they're on this board, so that's just a part of it.
And then I saw people get...
Get scapegoated for certain things in the military to protect others higher up the chain.
And, you know, that's just how it goes.
I think it's any big bureaucracy, really.
But I think it's been a part of just the human experience from the beginning of time, just like violence.
What I do hear from people is the violence part.
Like that.
And like is probably the wrong word.
But they recognize that violence has been a part of the human condition from the beginning of time.
And they like that I don't pull any punches in the pages of these things.
Some people hate it.
They like a sanitized version of violence.
And there's plenty of that out there.
And that's not me.
So for me, it's all about the story.
And I never look at, say, reviews.
Talking about negative comments before.
I never think about, oh, what's selling right now?
Or I've never had even my publisher.
And I didn't know going in what was going to happen with agents and publishers.
And if they were going to say, okay, we have this next time.
Can you lay off on this?
Or can you, can you do this a little more because this is selling right now?
Never, never even a hint.
They've had complete creative control on that side, which is different than screenwriting and screenwriting.
You have a team and then all those scripts and outlines, they go all the way up to the top of Amazon and back down with notes.
And then you incorporate those or you argue and come to some sort of an agreement or whatever it might be.
But team oriented on this side, only me on this side.
And I love that my publisher and agent have never hinted at doing anything differently because if it fails, it's all on me.
I can't say, man, I knew I shouldn't have listened to my agent or I shouldn't.
And my only vision of agents is it was Californication and Entourage.
I mean, everybody listening to this has obviously watched the video and seen that drone go in those doors and take the tour of that whole place before the day you opened, I think it was.
I remember you telling me about it beforehand, you know, and I was like, oh yeah, you came to the right place when you left L.A. I remember you were looking at a couple different places and I think you chose the right spot to come and then to build this, what you built here is so inspiring and so cool.
But that one, when I saw that video, I was like, oh, because you told me about like a year in advance, a year and a half, whatever it was.
And I was so excited when I saw that video and I texted you about it.
And it was such a weird gamble, because I left L.A. in the middle of this Spotify deal, this enormous deal, and they were like, what the fuck are you doing?
Yeah, we call it in sniper school a bold adjustment.
So you have a certain amount of time on that line and you have, especially if you're doing something with like an old M14 type of a thing where you're starting out and you're doing these clicks on your scope and On your elevation and like bold adjustments, gentlemen.
I remember them walking down the line saying that.
So you're not like taking a tiny click because they've got to get people through this course or get them out of the course or whatever it is.
So bold adjustment, okay, went there, boom, halfway back, bang, you're on.
Instead of these little tiny, very safe, tiny little adjustments that keep you on that line for another hour.
I didn't put it as eloquently as Jon Stewart did when he talked about the Wuhan lab coronavirus thing and the Hershey, the bit where he does on, hey, if there's an outbreak of chocolatey goodness in Hershey, Pennsylvania, you might want to look at the chocolate factory.
That guy was genius, but we did talk about it.
And at the time, you know, that was conspiracy theory craziness.
And I was like, well, there is a lab there.
So if I was a detective in any big city in the United States, I'd probably call that a clue.
At the time, I had been very fortunate to be friends with people that actually understood viruses and actually understood the fair and cleavage sites and the way that viruses normally jump from an animal host to a human, the natural spillover.
There's so many different factors that pointed to the idea that this is a gain-of-function research project that went wrong.
And that's what it was.
And there's still people out there that deny that.
That one little guy, that little fella, that little Anthony Fauci fella.
So these days, I read for people coming on the podcast.
I've read every book for people that have come on thus far.
I don't know if I'll always be able to.
But I think some of those books would have fallen to lower on the priority list if they weren't coming on the podcast.
But some of those conversations that I've had and the books I've read have made it into the pages of the novel.
So there's all this overlap to include this one.
Brian Moore has a book called The Able Archers, and it talks about a nuclear exchange that almost happened between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1983. And there was one guy in the Soviet Union, an officer on watch that night, who was not supposed to be there.
The guy who was supposed to be there got sick.
So this one guy steps up, goes in for the person who's sick, and he's the one guy who studied the United States, and he's...
I'm an intellectual, and he's put in this time and effort into understanding the strategic aspects of this conflict in the Cold War.
And there's a launch from the United States, ICBMs, heading towards the Soviet Union.
That's what shows up on their screen.
And what he's supposed to do is launch back.
And he has pressure from above to launch.
It's the protocol, and he doesn't.
Because he's like, this isn't right.
And it was a glitch in their system that showed...
Yeah, and there's all these other things at play, too.
A Korean Airlines flight 007 that was shot down earlier.
There's all these things happening that would lend themselves to...
Heightened tensions.
Exactly.
And those documents were just...
I think it was...
I might be off by a year or two, but I think it was 1999 when these documents were finally declassified, so well after the end of the Cold War.
But...
Things like that.
So I read that book and had that conversation with this guy, and he's a really nice guy, great guy, been in the intelligence world his whole career, and that made it into the pages of this novel.
So there's overlap, but Robert Kennedy has not been on the podcast yet, so I have not read that book, but I've been meaning to read it.
He was just on Russell Brand's podcast, and he talked about his uncle and his father's assassination.
Holy shit.
His recall is amazing.
His ability to just remember all these different pieces that were in play, particularly with the JFK assassination and Lee Harvey Oswald and the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA asset and that he had defected to Russia but it was a fake defection and all the different pieces that were in place that he could point to.
There's so much evidence.
He's like, if we went into this...
He said to Russell that if we just wanted to cover the evidence that the CIA killed JFK, he goes, this would be a 10-hour podcast.
I mean, in most of my books, I make mention, and this one in particular, go back to the church hearings and the Pike hearings of the 70s that exposed some overreach by agencies in the federal government, particularly the CIA. But as it pertains to the Kennedy assassination, it is so strange.
All these years later, they still walk into the Oval Office and have a private conversation and walk out, and all of a sudden, these documents that are mandated to be released by law are not.
Like, so odd.
But in this one also, a friend of mine married into the Kennedy family, so I went back to Hannesport, got to meet Robert Kennedy, and spent some time with Ethel Kennedy, and it was amazing.
And that experience also informs, I think you've gotten to that chapter already, where he goes to meet the old woman.
Yeah.
It inspired this book right here, and that was really cool to be back there and see.
Look at this chair, and in this chair, there's a little table next to it, and you see a picture of JFK watching the election results come in, and you look at the picture, and you look at the chair, and it's him in that chair right there.
It's amazing.
It was really interesting to be in that part of the world, in that place, with that family.
It's an old history.
Yeah, big time.
It inspired this, and I mean, who knows if we'll ever get to the bottom of that assassination.
And it wasn't that long ago.
Like when we were born, we thought it was a long time ago.
And Donnie Edwards, who has the best defense foundation, he has a picture of himself with a World War I veteran, which is pretty cool.
And so my daughter, who's 17, we went to Pearl Harbor and took 62 veterans back to Pearl Harbor for the 80th anniversary commemoration event about a year and a half ago.
Last June we went to Normandy so she's on Normandy with somebody who is the first out of his landing craft storming the beach and she's there on this beach with him and he's a hundred years old right now hearing that story from him and I'm getting pictures of them talking together and so one day she'll say I have a picture with a World War II veteran.
I don't know the exact numbers, but it was a lot, and then a lot when you think about the Pacific Campaign, and they did that over and over again, island after island after island.
And then those guys came home, and what did they do?
They did this study and they found, I think it was World War I, I might get this a little off, but the general gist is on track.
And they found that people dying in the North Atlantic that were there like treading water, trying to survive, trying to signal another boat, were the older guys were surviving and the younger guys that should be in better shape their whole life ahead of them were the ones that weren't.
And they thought, well, this is because those people haven't faced as much adversity as the older people.
So they started this Outward Bound thing, get kids in the outdoors, have them do a solo out there by themselves for a couple nights and put them in these positions that are uncomfortable.
That's an interesting thing in the world of fighting, because as fighters get older, they have more experience, more understanding, more toughness, but the body doesn't work right anymore.
So it's a privilege to be getting old, that's for sure, especially if you spend some time in an occupation where nature balances it out.
We had Cowboy come in the show.
He had a cameo.
Chris Brack got to put a tomahawk in his head, and that was awesome.
He flew in for the day, did that.
It was awesome.
We had a great time doing that.
We got to go out.
I spent some time with him also on the range out at SIG Freedom Days, but they have this sniper course they do in Utah the last couple of years, and we got to spend some time together out there.
That dude, he's one of the wildest guys I've ever met because the shit that he does outside of fighting, which is wild, they're always trying to get him to calm down because he's always doing things like Jumping jet skis and snowmobiles and just doing so much wild shit outside of fighting, which is the wildest fucking thing you could do as a sport.
I mean, remember back in the day when Point Break came out and Patrick Swayze was jumping every weekend, like actually jumping out of planes, and they were trying to, with insurance, like trying to get him to not do that.
And then he's like, well, for the next one, we've got to up it, and I'm going to take this motorcycle and jump off this cliff in, like, was it Norway or something like that?
And now that I'm the age that I am, these people are very young that are taking us out there.
They're the shark experts.
And we go out there in a boat, and off you go.
And they have a photographer there who's studying sharks at the University of Hawaii.
And then you get the shark expert also.
We're studying sharks at the University of Hawaii, but they're like 21, maybe.
And we zip down there, and they're looking at making sure there's no tiger sharks.
And we go in, and we do this dive, and our little guy's just snorkeling, but you dive down, and they get the picture, and you're seeing these sharks, and you learn a little bit about them.
And then we get back, and the same day, we find out that on Oahu, somebody got chomped.
So it was just about a month and a half ago.
And some girl was diving somewhere, not in Hawaii, but like in the Maldives or somewhere like that.
I also got chomped doing the exact same kind of snorkeling thing that a little guy was doing.
But I like how you say, if you're not going into the water like that, then you're not going to get eaten by a shark.
It's just kind of like if you don't jump out of the plane, then you're not going to burn in.
And I like the jumping.
In the military, I liked jumping.
I liked flying.
I shouldn't say I liked jumping.
I did not like going to the exit.
Because that's when you're like, okay, here we go.
You jump out, whether it's dark and you got all your stuff on or whatever it might be.
I was there years ago, and see that one right there in the far right?
I climbed to the top of that one.
And a long, long time ago, when it was all dark outside, I bribed some guards, got some horses, and rode out to that thing in the middle of the night, climbed up to the top, and then watched the sun rise over Cairo.
And then this is the thing I think about when I think about America today.
That every empire collapses.
And one of the things that Douglas Murray has talked about, and it's really fascinating to me, he said every society, when it's at the verge of collapse, becomes obsessed with gender.
And part of me thinks a good percentage of it is probably like some black project that they're not telling us about, that there's some insanely complex drone, an unmanned drone.
as capabilities beyond what we think of in terms of conventional propulsion systems.
Anyway, I built some old World War II planes back in the day, and I always see this stealth bomber that was like an interpretation from the toy company that made these models of a stealth bomber.
And it was pretty dang close when they actually revealed it years later.
Yeah, but two guys, Ryan Graves and Commander Fravor.
Both of them were fascinating.
Commander Fravor was the one that off the coast of San Diego in 2004, he encountered that object that went from more than 50,000 feet above sea level to 50 in less than a second.
They think there was something else that was under the water, that it was interacting with something that was under the water because there was ripples.
It was almost like a submarine.
So whatever that thing was that they encountered, that sort of...
That man, Commander Fravor, who is so rock solid.
When you talk to him, he's not a loon in any shape of the world.
He's just a fucking dedicated, lifelong pilot, military man who's just...
Yeah, and then there was Ryan Graves who said that I believe it was in 2014 they upgraded all of their equipment and then they started seeing these things because the equipment have new capabilities and they're seeing these things that are 120 knot winds completely motionless just staying and just totally still which is like how no no heat signature no visual means of propulsion they don't know what the fuck these things were doing Moving at insane rates of speed occasionally.
What's incredible too is this one of these guys, one of the soldiers that was in this documentary, they bring him to the crash site and this guy starts weeping and he's talking about it.
I mean, unless this guy's like the greatest fucking actor the world's ever known, the way he reacts when he sees this site, when he describes his experience, When they found this thing that it crash landed.
And there's also documentation that the Air Force had flown a jet to Virginia and returned with whatever the fuck they caught, whatever they got there, and brought it back to the United States.
I would guess that every civilization reaches a point of technological proficiency when they're also dealing with these territorial warring tribes where they have the ability to literally destroy the earth.
And that if this is a natural course of progression for intelligent beings, they get to this point There's a transition where it gets very dangerous.
And if I was from another planet and I was monitoring this, I would be there to make sure that they don't launch.
See, that's the theme of the Mothership Comedy Club, is that the rooms are called Fat Man and Little Boy.
And the reason why the rooms are called Fat Man and Little Boy is because that is a specific moment in UFO folklore when the aliens start arriving.
After the detonation of those bombs, that's when you start seeing this massive uptick in sightings.
And interactions with fighter pilots and these different military bases that have nuclear programs where the bases get shut down and all the power goes off.
Are they telling us because they really have this information and they want to slowly leak it out because this is an inevitable contact moment and they want to prepare civilization?
Or is it just horseshit?
Is it just they're distracting us?
And this is how they, you know, institute this drone program where they have this, you know, anti-gravity device and they can move it in the same rates of speed.
I mean, you see that in movies, and we all watch it in movies and think it's science fiction, but there's a lot of science fiction that has come to fruition, from submarines to going to the moon, to almost all sorts of space travel in general, flight, just flying.
So you have to have a very supportive family that understands that, hey, you're going to Iraq, you're going to Afghanistan, your best friends are in that trench with you to the right and the left, and so that pendulum has to be over here.
You owe that to them, their families, the country, the mission, the team.
But once you get out and, you know, can start building.
But it's about any business.
You're building, and you're solely focused on it, and your family's over here, and sometimes that does take a backseat when you're building.
But for me, I know that, yeah, I'm going to miss those times.
I'm going to miss all those interruptions in a few years here.
You want to be able to have a phone that you check every now and again, but have a phone where your wife has, your best friends have, and then don't let anybody give that fucker away.
So I think a lot of people forget that here, that no matter where you come from, no matter where you start, It's up to you.
You have opportunity here.
You're not forced into doing what your father did or whatever else.
You're not forced into that because of tradition and socioeconomic status and the country that doesn't give you these opportunities.
But we have that here.
So once you recognize that and then realize that you've got this one shot, like, You won the lottery being born here.
I feel like I won the lottery being born here, not having my buddy give the book to Chris Pratt or having somebody give the book to Simon& Schuster or whatever it was.
A buddy of mine from the Border Patrol texted me the other day.
I sent him one of the books.
I sent him one of these, actually, in this case right here.
And he's a Border Patrol agent down there.
And I sent it to him, and he got home from work, and he took a picture of it.
And he said, man, he texted me.
He's like, man, this was a rough day, and this made my day getting this, that you still remember me from these, you know, whatever.
But he said today was horrible.
And it was right, the Title 42 thing just a few days ago.
And he talked about people coming across and getting 1,500 bucks, I think it was, and off they go and how they're forced to release and do all these things.
And their job is to protect, yet they have to let through.
And they don't know who they're letting through.
Yeah, it's not a perfect screening process.
So you're this person that's supposed to protect.
You're supposed to be on that border, protecting that border.
Well, I mean, I think there's a voter base that a certain segment of society thinks is going to be more apt to vote for one side than the other.
But we have – I mean, when you talk about – and people like to make fun of Trump and the wall.
I mean, there are great memes out there about the wall.
And then people like to point to places in history where walls were meant to keep people in.
Well, no, the walls also work to keep people out.
And so it's just tough.
But you also, at the same time, as a compassionate person, you want to let that person in from Guatemala that worked their way all the way up here and put in that work for a new opportunity for them and their family here.
And that's going to be probably a productive citizen.
But along with that person comes other people with nefarious types of ambitions that can also work their way.
Yeah, no, it's the compassion of the American people.
We're very compassionate, I think, overall.
And just like when you see somebody who posts a picture of a dead animal and they're so excited, they put in all this work and they got there and they took this picture and they posted it and then they get destroyed.
Online because of these comments or whatever it might be.
It can be twisted and it can be turned and they're putting it up there because they're feeding their family or whatever else.
All these things are very connected because you can exploit and you can twist and you can turn all of them.
You can weaponize all of it.
Internet and social media in particular makes that a lot easier.
And now these companies that own these things are not American companies.
They're global multinational corporations and they benefit.
But America gave them, in most cases, that opportunity to be so successful, to be so wildly wealthy, more wealthy than most anyone in the history of the world.
Yeah, I appreciate those guys every day, and I think about them every day, so thankful that they're out there every day, willing to do that job, willing to be teachers, willing to put themselves on the line, on the border, willing to suit up and get in that squad car and roll into the city or whatever else, knowing that there's a whole segment of society that just wants to vilify them no matter what they do, and it's a tough position to be in.
You want to teach kids or whatever else, and all of a sudden you find yourself embroiled in some crazy controversy, and you're like, I just want to teach kids some history or want to teach them math.
I mean, they're getting that squad car to protect and they go out and people make a mistake and there's good people and bad people in every single institution and every single organization.